The National Crime Surveys, of which these Commercial
Victimization Surveys are a part, were conducted to obtain current and
reliable measures of serious crime in the United States. The
Commercial Victimization Surveys are restricted to coverage of
burglary and robbery incidents. They include all types of commercial
establishments as well as political, cultural, and religious
organizations. The survey includes a series of questions about the
business, e.g., type and size, form of ownership, insu... (more info)

The National Crime Surveys, of which these Commercial
Victimization Surveys are a part, were conducted to obtain current and
reliable measures of serious crime in the United States. The
Commercial Victimization Surveys are restricted to coverage of
burglary and robbery incidents. They include all types of commercial
establishments as well as political, cultural, and religious
organizations. The survey includes a series of questions about the
business, e.g., type and size, form of ownership, insurance, security,
and break-in and robbery characteristics. Time and place, weapon,
injury, entry evidence, offender characteristics, and stolen property
data were collected for each of the incidents. Data on both victimized
and nonvictimized establishments in 26 different cities were collected
during 1972, 1973, and 1974. In the 1975 survey, data from the 13
cities surveyed during 1972 and 1973 were collected again.

These data are contained in 39 hierarchical data
files. There are two record types, business records and incident
records. Every case has a business record. The number of incident
records for a particular case varies according to the number of times
(if any) that business had been victimized during the reference
period. There are 168 variables.

Methodology

Sample:
Data were obtained from separate samples of business
enterprises and organizations in each of the 26 cities through a
multistage cluster sample design.

Data Source:

personal interviews

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Standardized missing values.

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Version(s)

Original ICPSR Release:1984-03-18

Version History:

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 40 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 40 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.